I'd guess that NY State will ban 3D printers...

Now you need a license for the lower receive. I think there will be more licenses for gun part.

Besides that publishing of 3D ready gun models will be prohibited.

There's no limits to stupidity when you use emotion to manipulate and control people; it has worked for politicians and popes for centuries..

Smelting iron should be illegal by that logic, and charcoal?

Index fingers...

There's a practical plan--look how well it worked for the music industry.

Good luck with that one too. It's not like you can run a ballistics test on a plastic magazine, and 3D printers go out of adjustment so fast that it's really unlikely you could identify the individual machine the way Ellery Queen et al. used to do with typewriters.

Anyway, you take a USB key down to your local hackerspace, and print whatever you like. What are they going to do, post sentries?

The problem is people who have lost the will to live, and don't fear the consequences because they aren't going to leave the scene alive anyway, and don't believe in an afterlife. Even if there were no semiautomatic weapons, anyone can make a pipe bomb. This is not a uniquely American or even modern phenomenon--not just suicide bombers and anarchists. The Jewish-Roman historian Josephus records that King Herod the Great was so concerned to prevent public rejoicing over his death that he ordered a mass execution of prominent citizens to take place upon his demise. (Fortunately this order was not carried out.)

A flurry of ill-advised lawmaking and outbursts of hatred at perceived political enemies will not help. Life is dangerous, and ultimately fatal.

I share the deep desire that such things as Newtown should never happen, but we live in a fallen world, and we ourselves are all evil at some level. We can't fix that by even the wisest laws, or by our own moral effort, though we should work for wise laws and strive to treat others better. (Try obeying your conscience _exactly_ for a month, and you'll see what I mean. It's impossible.)

That's the bad news that makes the Good News good.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

"No technology can be considered successful until it is abused." (Me, approx 1975)

I guess 3D printing can now be considered successful.

Home gun fabrication is nothing new. Anyone with a knowledge of lost wax casting, powder metallurgy, or foundry techniques can cast weapon parts. Same with anyone that has access to numerical control machines or a small hydraulic stamping press. Cast metals are not easily heat treated, so there will be limitations on what can be made. For example, I would not try to fire live ammunition in a cast aluminum barrel or chamber. If the government really wanted to prevent do-it-thyself gun making, they would need to also close down all the machine shops, foundrys, sheet metal stamping shops, etc.

I'm not terribly worried about people cloning conventional firearms. The design of these weapons has been fairly well optimized over the years. Building these from inferior materials or using marginal fabrication techniques is just not going to work. What worries me is that 3D printing now allows anyone to make creative adaptations, such as Gyrojet clones, pocket rockets, small rail guns, guided projectiles, and other non-conventional weapons that don't require high strength meterials. The only reason such alternative weapons have not become popular is that currently cheap and available ammunition makes them economically unattractive.

Please fasten your seat belts. The road ahead is going to be a rough ride.

I doubt that it'll be much different. It's the basic goodwill and instinct for self-preservation that most of us share that keeps us as safe as we are now. Why would homemade railguns change that?

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Add to this list access to 3D printers and knowledge of 3D file formats and it sounds less and less like a "feel depressed->grab a gun->walk into a school" type of person. If you went through all this trouble and spent all that money and time to learn all this, you will cherish the gun as an art piece (which is what it will be in this case). You would never do anything crazy with it and even then, it would probably jam on the second round. Well, maybe not if you're good at it, but if I were a public official with limited funds trying to do something meaningful with what's available, I would not even bother with DIYs.

Same thing applies to non-conventional weapons: you would be so friken proud of what you've done that you would much rather post an Instructable about it than do anything so stupid with it. There was already a 3W (or more-can't remember exactly) handheld laser gun made by a DIYer and then posted about with enough detail to build one yourself. But you should not worry too much about anyone walking into a school and starting to blind pre-schoolers with it - it costs too much and by the time you are done building it, you would love the thing so much, your next step would be to build an acrylic display for it. Yeah, you'd fire it a few times and pop some balloons with it, perhaps even filled with hydroxy mix ;) but you'd do it in a controlled and safe environment. One or two (dozens?) successful firings would be enough to satisfy an engineer's curiosity and into the acrylic display it goes...

Why? Supposedly, you'd be able to print bullet-proof vests, too. Why not?

Cheers!